Winning Mark

Organizing for America (the community action organization built on top of the highly successful campaign to elect Barack Obama) has launched a new campaign and web application allowing citizens to urge senators to support real healthcare reform, using social media both to both enable and track these conversations. Tweet Your Senator gives politically-active Twitter users an easy way to contact their representatives in the Senate - for the end user, it's as simple as entering a zip code and choosing to send the provided tweet along with its included hashtags. The interactive map showing related tweets is updated in real time, showing in an interesting and compelling way that this is in fact a nationwide grassroots effort. The tweet itself looks something like this:

To Sen. Ron Wyden: Americans can't wait anymore. Health insurance reform must pass this year http://bit.ly/j63je #hc09 #OR #97205

Just as the Obama campaign's pioneering and successful effort to collect cell phone numbers allowed them to use text messaging to activate supporters in huge numbers, including easily trackable hashtags in each tweet lets Organizing for America expand their supporter database to include Twitter users. Additionally, since the application adds action-specific and ZIP Code hashtags to every tweet, Organizing for America can segment their supporter lists by action more easily and accurately. Again the Obama team has shown that new media and communications tools can be an effective tool for political action, if used properly.

Of course, as in most applications of social media it's virtually impossible for Organizing for America to hold a monopoly on the use of the #hc09 hashtag to track Twitter activity on the healthcare issue:

To Congress: REJECT Obama's Socialized Health Care! http://www.rightmarch.com/obamacare.htm #hc09

That people on both side of the political issue are able to agree on the use of the #hc09 hashtag to categorize discussions about healthcare reform in 2009 speaks to Twitters stability as a communications platform and its acceptance by a hugely varied user base.

Posted by Jeremy Sher on July 28, 2009 in Social Media, Web